These challenges include issues stemming from greater remote working and physical unavailability, cancellations and postponing of important meetings and events (e.g., tradeshows, conferences, customer meetings), travel restrictions and border shutdowns by different countries, an overwhelming number of COVID-19-related communications (some of which is speculation/or and irrelevant), and greater stakeholder mental (e.g., exhaustion, stress, anxiety) and physical (e.g., stress headaches) health issues. The COVID-19 pandemic is, for example, bringing about interrelated social, technological, and structural challenges for many B2B sales forces. The emergence and rapid spread of COVID-19 was unanticipated and, as of April 2020, has had immediate and severe impact on B2B sales forces. While anticipated change can certainly lead to challenges and opportunities for B2B organizations and their respective sales forces, it is hasty unanticipated change that is most likely to leave organizations and their respective sales forces vulnerable and partially paralyzed ( Williams, Gruber, Sutcliffe, Shepherd, & Zhao, 2017 Zoltners, Sinha, & Lorimer, 2008). Over this time, there has been, for example, an increasing of stakeholder (e.g., customer, employee, investor) expectations, stakeholder knowledge and access to information, globalization, technological advancements, competitive offerings, complexity in buying and selling processes, among other changes ( Arli, Bauer, & Palmatier, 2018 Hartmann, Wieland, & Vargo, 2018 Lim, 2020). Many sales managers and salespeople representing business-to-business (B2B) organizations would agree with Greek philosopher Heraclitus's statement “The only constant in life is change.” After all, B2B markets have experienced substantial ongoing change over the last several decades ( Lussier & Hartmann, 2017). These efforts lead to a rich discussion and set of considerations that can help B2B sales forces better understand and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and other crises. In doing so, we conduct a review of practitioner-oriented articles, interviews with key informants working for B2B organizations, and a webinar with sales professionals. We tailor Leavitt's model to the B2B sales context and recognize the potential for exogenous shocks such as COVID-19 to impact each variable. Leavitt's model of organizational change, and socio-technical systems theory, point to the importance of considering four inter-related social (i.e., human and structure) and technical (i.e., task and technology) variables when examining organizational change, and recognizing that change to one variable can be predicated upon and/or bring about change to other variables. Such challenges call attention to the importance of frameworks that can be applied to aid sales managers in understanding the impact of and responses to COVID-19. The COVID-19 pandemic is bringing about immediate, wide-ranging, and severe challenges for many B2B sales forces.
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